Polish liquor venture targets rescue of Jewish relics

Press, 1 February 1988, Page 31

Polish liquor venture targets rescue of Jewish relics

By

MICHAEL WISE

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw Poland plans to devote part of its famed vodka industry to producing kosher alcoholic drinks - and will allow a private foundation to use the profits to rescue the relics of Polish Jewish culture from oblivion.

The joint venture between the Communist State vodka monopoly Polmos and the West Ger-man-based businessman, Sigmund Nissenbaum, is expected to begin under strict observance of Jewish dietary laws early this year.

Mr Nissenbaum, a Jew who survived the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi concentration camps, returned to his native Poland in 1983 for the first time in almost 40 years and visited a desecrated cemetery where his ancestors are buried. “What I saw so shocked me that I decided I must work to keep up Jewish culture here,” he said. “We have a responsibility to save what is left to be

saved.” The 1000-year-old Jewish community in Poland numbered over three million before the Nazi extermination camps were set up in World War 11. Some 150,000 survived, but many have since left and a largely elderly group of 3000 is all that remains today. Hundreds of cemeteries and synagogues were vandalised during and after the war; tombstones were hauled off for use in construction, neglected synagogues sometimes turned into stables or stores. Mr Nissenbaum, aged 60, is already using personal wealth amassed in import-export, machinery and jewellery businesses to fund restoration of Warsaw’s Brodno cemetery and another Jewish burial place in Kielce, south of the capital.

Proceeds from the vodka business and a separate joint venture to produce technical measurement systems — he will hold a 49 per cent interest in both — will

help restore other cemeteries and former houses of prayer round the country.

Mr Nissenbaum also has hopes to revive Jewish education in Poland and found a school for young people. “It is not just for the dead,” he said of efforts by the Nissenbaum family foundation. “We must also think of the living, the few who are still living here. Until now none of us (surviving Polish Jewish exiles) have bothered.”

Polmos’s deputy director Andrzej Klamut, said that the joint venture, known as Polkosher, would this year produce 90,000 litres of kosher Wyborowa vodka, extra rye Zubrowka vodka, and a special kosher Sliwowitz plum brandy for Passover.

Kosher vodka, prepared under rabbinic supervision and in accordance with complex Jewish laws and traditions, was produced in Poland until Germany invaded in 1939.

Its manufacture was resumed on a small scale after World War II until the 19705. Poland no longer has a rabbi to serve its dwindling Jewish community, but Mr Nissenbaum said rabbis would be flown in from the United States and Western Europe at least eight times a year to inspect the special vodka plant. “This is nothing but business,” Mr Klamut replied when asked about the religious and cultural significance of Poland reviving its kosher vodka enterprise. Ninety-nine per cent of the product will be exported, and annual sales are expected to total $3.04 million by 1992. Over all, Polish vodka exports now amount to $1.52 million a year.

“Many people know that Wybrowka is good, so they know that kosher Wybrowka will be good too,” said Mr Klamut, adding that Poland was not aiming the product exclusively at a Jewish

market. Poland’s Office of Religious Affairs said that the Communist authorities welcomed the Nissenbaum Foundation’s help. “I consider what they are doing useful,” a spokesman said. “It would be good if we had much more such initiatives from Jewish groups because the State hasn’t the funds to restore all the monuments to Jewish culture that need restoration.”

The restoration of the cemeteries and synagogues appears more likely to enable Poland to use them as museums and artefacts, attracting Western Jewish tourists, than to encourage the growth of any contemporary Jewish culture.

In recent years, Poland has sought to improve its standing with Jews abroad after the Communist Party carried out antiSemitic purges in 1968 which led to mass emigration and further reduced the post-war remnants of Polish Jewry.